June 2014

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The car business has many a tragic tale to tell, but the most tragic may be that of Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. His enchromed name rides down the mea-tus of the grille of one of FoMoCo’s most lasting embarrassments, and the ­symbolism of that name in that grille shape turned out to tell us everything we needed to know about how Ford père saw Ford fils. In Henry’s view, Edsel’s jazz-age lifestyle and love of the Continent made him a dandy, a fop, a, well, something that looks very much like the Edsel’s front grille.

But Mr. Ford was wrong about his son. Though Henry demeaned and alienated him throughout his adulthood, it was Edsel who kept Ford relevant. When Henry obstinately held that the Model T was the only car Americans would ever need, Edsel pushed the company to build what would become the wildly successful Model A, for which Henry promptly took credit. And with the help of designer E.T. “Bob” Gregorie, Edsel not only gave Lincoln a place in the luxury market, he also created the Model 40 Special Speedster that was the missing link between ’30s Grand Prix cars such as the Bugatti Type 35 and the postwar American hot rod. He had taste and vision and judgment, and he was a gentle man who saw how violently the world around him was changing.

In A.J. Baime’s remarkable new book, The Arsenal of Democracy, Edsel gets his due. Baime recounts how the son’s twin affinities for Europe and aviation combined to give his family’s company a pivotal role in the outcome of World War II. On the eve of that conflict, American military power was nearly ­nonexistent. We thought our oceans could protect us, like some great moat.
The U.S. Army was the world’s 16th largest (behind Romania’s), with just 200,000 enlisted men to Hitler’s 7 million. The Army Air Corps could claim fewer than 1300 planes. We were in no position to fight fascism with anything more than words.

This would be the first war in which air power would be a decisive factor. President Roosevelt saw that, and so did Edsel. Despite his father’s resistance, Edsel asserted that Ford would build a factory that could crank out a plane an hour for the war effort. Using its assembly-line process, the enterprise did just that, producing the far-reaching and hugely destructive B-24 Liberator at ­Willow Run. The rest, as they say, is history.